Maddow's Dishonest Scare Parade on NC Voting

Last night the great David Webb filled in for Sean Hannity on Fox News. Webb put on Allen West and Juan Williams to talk about urban malaise. The visuals at Fox must have been too much for Rachel Maddow, because she put up an hour-long show designed to scare people about voting rights. Her already small audience might have been even smaller otherwise.

The hour-long Maddow special, done with a live remote in North Carolina, was designed to scare voters that their voting rights were about to vanish.

The special was full of intellectually dishonest scare tactics, hyperbole, false statements, leading questions for reporters, and outright fear mongering.

Of course, nobody was invited on the show to name the dishonesty.

Naturally, the show featured a parade of college democrats and academics out of central casting, including professor and Castro apologist Renee Scherlen. Notice the sign behind Scherlen deliberately placed on camera. Read all about the totalitarian history of “En Cada Barrio” in Cuba. Hanging a sign for En Cada Barrio is the equivalent of hanging a recruiting poster for the S.A.

Democrat activist student Mollie Clawson also complained that her flip flops might fall off if she had to walk through the grass to her polling place. Such are the complaints of the grievance generation.

What the Maddow show didn’t have was any dissent. Not a single guest appeared to rebut any of her false charges.

That’s standard operating procedure for Maddow. Her skill is preaching to the choir, not having vigorous intellectual debate about ideas. Dissent is forbidden, sort of like En Cada Barrio. That’s why if you want actual debate between both sides of an issue, you need to turn to Hannity–or, last night, to David Webb.

Why doesn’t Maddow permit any dissent, any critical guests on her show when it comes to voting issues? It’s not like experts don’t exist who could handily rebut her. She doesn’t permit dissent on her show because her show is about Democrat activism–not voting rights, not airing both sides, not fairness. It’s about activism, period.

Her job is to stoke fears, preferably race-based fears. Her job is to present the Orthodoxy of the vote fraud deniers and the racial left. It isn’t to be a journalist. Her job is to mobilize turnout for the 2014 election, nothing more. If that weren’t true, she would invite a guest on to rebut the factual and legal fallacies she airs.

We’ve learned a great deal from the election-focused left lately. They are perplexed that they no longer have a monopoly on the discourse about election issues. Often, this manifests as ridicule–other times as flippant dismissal. Rarely does it manifest as engagement on the issues. They have a long pedigree in this regard; dissent is not to be tolerated. That’s why Maddow doesn’t have guests appear on her shows about election issues, and she does a disservice to her (small number of) viewers.